My childhood faith taught me that God was omnipresent and omnipotent, two fancy words for saying God was everywhere and all-powerful. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. There wasn’t anything he didn’t see. As a child, that feels comforting, like a divine safety blanket, a good parent keeping your home safe and secure, the bad guys locked out. I believed I would be safe and protected and guided and given good things. God was with me. Who could be against me?

But then life happens. At first, wrestling with smaller inconsistencies with this view of God caused me minor discomfort. If God is in control, why did I feel lonely and have a hard time making friends? If God is present everywhere, why did some people live in American luxury and others live in dirt huts on the other side of the world? These inconsistencies caused discomfort, but I found ways to rationalize them or suppress them in order to return to the overarching theologies of God that gave me security and safety.

Some people rationalize bad things with terrible theology—views that go something along the lines of how bad things are God’s judgment on people who do wrong. Natural disasters become God’s wrath made manifest. Someone might imply a lingering illness or chronic condition is the result of your lack of faith or failure to repent. These views are atrociously wrong, mostly because they paint God in a horrendous light. They paint him like a pagan deity who must be appeased with sacrifice and right living or else his wrath will fall. Set your heart and mind at ease, beloved. God is not like that.

Believing that bad things are God’s judgement is horrible theology. It means that God’s love is conditional. It means you have to perform in order to earn or keep it, that you will have to live in fear of losing it. No thank you. That’s not the God I know now. But I will offer the bounty of grace to others who believe those things and wonder if perhaps people turn to those theologies because they don’t know what to do with the discomfort of complexity. What do bad things mean? Why am I hurting? How can I control my life? Anxiety about questions like these may drive people to look for a clear-cut black-and-white view that makes them feel safer or more in control. But that control is just a mirage.

My mirage cracked my year in the cult and in the years beyond. I offered my life in service to God. The result was my life shattered. That left me reeling. That wasn’t supposed to happen to a good Christian girl who had followed the rules, obeyed authority, and offered her life in service to others. I was supposed to have a good story, not this mess which eventually left me swearing at God while sitting in an itchy field of overgrown grass and weeds, hiding behind a sewage drain pit because the pain of it was so intense I didn’t know how to go on. What did I do wrong? Where was God? He was asking too much of me. Or he was angry at me. Everything I thought I knew about the goodness of God seemed to crack and splinter and give way. Either I had failed, or he had failed. Neither was a reality I wanted to face.

Three years later while I was still muddling through the loss of direction and dreams with no clear career or ministry path and I still didn’t know what to do with my life and I still couldn’t find God, I also lost my first pregnancy. It felt like the last straw. I remember having the repeating thought: God hates me. On some cognitive level I knew that wasn’t true, but it felt true in the embodied cells of by being. I’ve lost everything, and now I lose this? Nothing in my life is turning out. God is against me. He must hate me. How I felt needed validated, and at the same time, I had to learn it wasn’t true.

I do have a good story. I believe that now. It took me five or six years to get there and be able to look back and be grateful for the cult, or at least grateful for the fruit it produced in my life. It helped me quit performing, it taught me boundaries, it taught me to grieve, to get comfortable with mess and dissonance. It gave me a more present version of God who loved me where I was at and wanted me to learn to love myself where I was at. It challenged faulty theology and ultimately gave me a bigger, more expansive view of God. It schooled me in humility and acknowledging there is more and more I don’t know. These are all things I’m intensely grateful for.

But I’ve also had to come to the place where I don’t believe God wanted me to be inflicted with the cult. That wasn’t his intent for my life. His heart wasn’t to have me be spiritually abused. He didn’t send me there as a punishment for something I did wrong. It was just a mess of a bunch of fallen people all tangled up in harmful ways. Part of that mess was me. My savior complex played a role. I was naïve and without boundaries and charged into a circumstance that wasn’t healthy. Some of that was on the environment in which I was raised and their collective blind spots and fallenness too, the things I hadn’t learned yet because they didn’t know to teach me. A lot of it was on the fallenness of the leaders in the cult. We all got hurt. And none of it was God’s heart. But he is capable of transforming that awful experience into something of value. He wasn’t going to be held up by that brokenness. He was bigger than it.

So why do bad things happen?

Some bad things are the consequences of our own poor decisions. And God is not going to rescue us from those. That’s often part of the maturity process.

Some bad things are the consequences of other people’s poor decisions. Those suck. Somebody else drives drunk. Somebody else starts a war. Somebody else abuses you. The list could go on ad infinitum. You weren’t the cruel or foolish one, yet you are left holding the repercussions of someone else’s fallenness. In some ways, a whole world of other people’s fallenness. The world is broken friend, if you haven’t looked around and noticed.

And some bad things, well, there’s just not clear reasons why bodies fail, natural disasters occur, or freak accidents happen.

At the root of asking, Why do bad things happen? is a much deeper, dangerous question: Does God love me? Personally, I think the challenge is to answer the second question without always getting a clear answer to the first. Suffering is a mystery. Learn to hold the mystery. Work to accept that you aren’t going to get all the answers regarding why. But in the midst of it, we have to trust that God is there. He’s not causing it, but he’s with us. He’s not running away. He’s not afraid of the suffering, and he’s not afraid of our response to the suffering. He wants to be let in, to hear your heart, to experience it with you.

So the answer is yes, beloved, to that deep vulnerable question: Am I loved? YES. No matter what. Always. Forever. God loves you. Period. No excuses. No but’s. You may not feel loved, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t. Circumstances may be brutal, but that doesn’t mean you’re not loved. I’m not dismissing the complicated and important nature of the question of why bad things happen, but first and foremost we have to search and struggle to seek the solid ground that we have been loved and forgiven before the beginning of time. None of your pain is because God thinks you deserve it. The cross shows us that. The cross is not an act of God exacting punishment on his son and inflicting violence within the trinity in order to pay for your sins. He didn’t have to wait until the cross to make you loveable. He is omnipresent and omnipotent. He can love and forgive from anywhere anytime. Period. He is not so small to be held back by the ways you miss the mark. The cross is not a punishment. Neither is your personal version of pain. The cross is an exquisite view of co-suffering love. I’ve always loved you, God says. Now you can just see it more clearly.

What Jesus offers us in his personhood are presence and co-suffering love.

He came to be with us—Emmanuel—to pitch his tent and tabernacle among us. That’s what that word means. He will sit with you in your pain. That doesn’t mean he will “fix” it, at least in the way you want him to, but he will abide with you in it. He won’t shirk away from your tears, your rage, your questions, your doubt, your angry rants, your desperate prayers. He will sit with you through it all. Gladly.

I recently had a conversation with someone who believes that God can fix and redeem anything. He was convinced he could be completely free of hurt from the past. On one hand, this is a noble, big faith. He believes in a God who is that big and capable. But on the other hand, I also indirectly find that a small view of God. This person’s experience might involve feeling completely free from resentment over a wrongful harm done to him, but the reality is that God didn’t “fix” that situation. The harm wasn’t undone, the decisions weren’t unmade, and he is still living out the natural consequences of that wrong years later in a practical way. I told this person I would never be free from the cult I had been a part of. He thought that was sad. But I don’t. It’s just realistic. The cult completely changed me as a person. For good or bad? this person wanted to know. Probably some of both. I won’t use the words good and bad per se. How about the view that the cult has instilled in me both strengths and weaknesses. I will always be more sensitive to boundary violations and red flags of overused authority or abuse. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s a weakness at times. But it’s my story, and I’m going to own it.

My therapist says the goal is never to be completely rid of something. If you carry childhood traumas, abuse, grief, loss, etc, you will never leave those completely behind. Jesus does not completely fix them. They will forever be part of your story. The goal is to tend to them, process them, so that they stop taking up so much room in your life. They get relegated to a smaller and smaller corner of your being. Occasionally they will still flare up, often at unexpected times, and I can nod and say, oh yeah. There’s that again. But I don’t have to go back to the original years of PTSD when I couldn’t get my cult leader out of my head. I don’t think about her much anymore. She’s still there. I’ve still been radically altered by my encounter with her. But I’m not controlled by her anymore. I mostly don’t feel angry. Mostly. I’ve moved on. And yet I haven’t. Not completely. Jesus can’t and won’t erase that experience from my life. It will always be there. That’s okay. More than okay, I think that’s healthy. It’s naïve and dismissive to say otherwise.

If we say that Jesus can fix everything and he doesn’t, what does that mean for the person who will struggle with life-long depression and have to manage it rather than be “cured” from it? What does it mean for someone who goes to a week-long spiritual healing intensive, conference, or deliverance session to fix their marriage, but when they get back, the problem persists? What does it mean for the mother who loses her child? What does it mean for a parent with an incurable disease who will likely die before her children are grown? What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?

There are no tidy answers to those questions. But I can tell you what it doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean you did anything to deserve this.

It doesn’t mean God doesn’t love you.

Suffering happens. It’s a fact of life. And Jesus doesn’t fix everything. Personally, underneath the multi-layered levels of frustration and pain, I find that to be good news. Maybe you can too.